Fascism is on its historical revisionism tour, much like self-defense and speech rights could only support one ideology. Some would like to triangulate fascism as independent of its identification with World War II as a battle against fascism. Such a revisionism would facilitate Holocaust denial and reduce that war to territorial struggles against German territorial expansion.
In that sense totalitarianism couldn’t possibly happen where “populist values” trump human rights in both figurative and literal senses by insisting on nonexistent election fraud. Yet as we have seen, crypto-fascism or proto-fascism abounds in historical examples, particularly in the application of police powers. The “alt-Right” branding is much like the invoking such “alternative facts” because calling something “fascist” is anachronistic, even “politically incorrect” (sic).
There have been numerous efforts to discredit antifa by various right-wing groups and individuals.[18][19] Some have been done via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as antifa backers on Twitter;[20][21][22] some hoaxes have been picked up and portrayed as fact by right-leaning media and politicians.[20][23][24][25] While the Trump administration blamed antifa for orchestrating the George Floyd protests of mid-2020, analysis of federal arrests found no link.[26] There were repeated calls by Donald Trump and William Barr to designate antifa as a terrorist organization[27] despite the fact that it is not an organization. Academics, legal experts, and others have argued such an action would exceed the authority of the presidency and violate the First Amendment.[28][29][30] Several analyses, reports, and studies have concluded that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.[17][31][32]
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Logic gets waterboarded again as the branding of “fascism” gets its denotative due. Conservatives couldn’t possibly be proto-fascists, because populism won’t let them be as racist as they might want to be. Much like a white ethno-state might not represent racial purity, denial and ignorance defines the subtlety of 21st Century Nazism and neo-nazism.
This counter-revolution attempts to hijack discourse by proclaiming that “cultural marxism” has rehabilitated antisemitism in an attack on the professional-managerial class. Even if we “hate Nazis”, the ACLU also defend their right to proclaim it, and our right to denounce it, but now proto-fascists on some school boards want to take that next step to burn books.
Antifa, Paul Gottfried writes, is “far too irrational and nihilistic to be Marxist.”. John Villa’s review of Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, by Paul Gottfried (Northern Illinois University Press: 2021), 216 pages., claims that the connotative integrity of pure antisemitism is obscured by the imprecise use of the term.
Antifa must be “too irrational and nihilistic” because it can’t be sufficiently organized to resist fascism when it appeared in DC on 6 January 2021. If antifa was so dangerous, why the heck didn’t they show up like in the Women’s Marches to burn stuff. Old whine in new MAGA t-shirts.
Paul Gottfried (a "paleo-conservative") said that even in his Yale class in the late 1960s, even among liberals, the students from Minnesota were seen as very leftwing.
“Youngkin also avoided the lazy habit of referring to his Democratic opponent as a “socialist.” Contrary to the ingrained habit of [GOP] to call their opponents “big government” spenders with Marxist tendencies, he recognized that a cultural war has erupted.”— Paul Gottfried
To accomplish this political purpose, fascism is defined broadly to include those who have no ideological connection to its original historical meaning. No longer “firmly anchored in time and space,” fascism has become “a ubiquitous, continuing danger to democratic societies” and a term “wielded by the powerful…in such a way as to silence pesky dissenters.” Those who identify as antifascists today are not expressing a coherent worldview but rather “a collection of sentiments and attitudes” that amount to “a statement against the Western past.” The antifascist left is pushing the ruling class farther in the direction it is already moving: “toward transforming Western countries into multicultural societies, erasing the remnants of a reactionary historical past, and assuring popular acceptance of nontraditional lifestyles.”
The antifascist left smears their “fascist” opponents with the Nazi and anti-Semitic label. However, fascism and Nazism are not identical. Latin fascism, writes Gottfried, was not defined by extreme racism against Jews and Slavs or by a totalitarian state apparatus that was characteristic of the Third Reich. “It is difficult for me to see how the Nazi orgy of killing was simply a variation of Latin fascism or similar in character to something as anodyne as Austrian clerical fascism.” Mussolini’s embrace of German-style anti-Semitism in 1938 was a dramatic departure from longstanding fascist practice. Despite his authoritarianism, Il Duce was considered a leftwing reformer until his alliance with Nazi Germany. Members of his cabinet were vocal critics of Hitler. Only a couple years earlier, Jewish refugees from Germany were given asylum in Italy. Even some Eastern European Zionists “venerated” Mussolini for providing a nationalist blueprint for a future Jewish state. Early supporters of the fascist movement included Jewish members of the Italian bourgeoisie. Mussolini’s mistress was a Sephardic Jew.
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Gottfried and reviewer John Vella ignore antisemitic events like the Ardeatine massacre as inconveniently as the affinity of traditionalism binds today’s conservative Catholicism to anti-democratic populist insurrections and global white supremacism. Gottfried ignores the reality of anti-fascist organizing in the 20th Century, much like Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally had “two” sides of “very fine people”.
When Italian dictator Benito Mussolini consolidated power under his National Fascist Party in the mid-1920s, an oppositional anti-fascist movement surfaced both in Italy and countries such as the United States. Many anti-fascist leaders in the United States were anarchist, socialist, and syndicalist émigrés from Italy with experience in labor organizing and militancy.[70] Ideologically, antifa in the United States sees itself as the successor to anti-Nazi activists of the 1930s. European activist groups that originally organized to oppose World War II-era fascist dictatorships re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to oppose white supremacy and skinheads, eventually spreading to the United States.[49]
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It is even more confusing when Gottfried considers that “multicultural leftism” is disinterested in economic change, because “culture”, except for that apparently neoliberal administrative state that ideologues like Steve Bannon want to deconstruct.
Paul Gottfried was the first person to use the term "alternative right", when referring specifically to developments within American right-wing politics, in 2008.[3] Richard B. Spencer co-created the term with Gottfried while the two men were working for Taki's Magazine and helped it to gain wider currency through media attention surrounding conferences organized by his think tank, the white supremacist National Policy Institute.[4][5][6]
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(2017)
About ten years ago I published a book, The Strange Death of Marxism, which argued strenuously that the present Left is not Marxist, but post-Marxist. Unlike traditional Marxists and European democratic socialists, the type of Left that has gained ground since and even before the fall of the Soviet Empire is culturally radical but only secondarily interested in economic change. Our present Left makes its peace with private enterprise and even large corporations, providing it can impose its idea of social and cultural transformation on increasingly powerless citizens and their increasingly indoctrinated children. Not that this Left is particularly friendly to anything that is private, including economic transactions. But it treats the economy as something that it can influence without having to nationalize, thereby avoiding those disastrous policies that socialist governments of the past tried to enact. Our own master class has sensibly concluded that it’s better to allow market forces to operate while making sure that public administration can dip, when it advances a pretext, into the profits. Further, the master class endlessly bullies the public into going along with increasingly complicated behavioral guidelines, supposedly intended to fight “discrimination.” It is the culture and only instrumentally the government that the post-Marxist Left seeks to dominate; and the type of administrative state that has expanded explosively in every Western country since the 1960s is an effective instrument by which social engineers and sensitivity commissars can do their work.
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